Feral Sunar // Allianz Türkiye - Agile Coach
As an Agile Coach, I have heard the same question over and over at the beginning of my journey in teams with whom I embarked on the agile transformation journey: “What will working agile add to us differently? What will change in our lives?”
Teams often want quick results in transformations. On the first day, a magic wand is expected. Great meanings are loaded and anticipated. In reality, the first transformation in teams that have started to work agile are sometimes too small success stories to be seen with the naked eye.
For example, one day you look at a team that is running its 10th sprint and you see:
One of the team wants to pull a new job from the 'sprint backlog'* in an area where he has never worked before. Everyone gets excited. When they make a little effort, they feel more that they are transferred to a work environment where they can easily work in other areas.
Someone else who is always preparing a report with a superior and sending it to him/her for approval, decides to work with the superior two levels up, who is also the main person that needs the report. Hierarchical habits are gradually disappearing.
One day, they realize that the same request comes to two different team members on a daily and that both team members work for the same job without knowing each other. The team starts to finish the "daily" in 15 minutes as it doesn't need anything more to align. The daily, which they initially found mechanical, has now become their most productive ritual.
During the midterm performance review period, two members of the team request an appointment from their Agile Coach to give feedback on their two friends. The new performance evaluation process has started to make everyone an active part of the process.
One of the team shares with the whole team the pre-prepared short notes for the "review" and "retrospective" ceremonies that he cannot attend. The team completes the “sprint review” as if everyone was there and closes the sprint.
Although such small stories are experienced in large numbers in teams, these details, which herald the beginning of transformation, do not please many people and are often overlooked.
The key is “to find joy in the little things”
Regarding the subject, I will refer to the book named "Oyuncu Anne" written by Şermin Yaşar** that I read years ago. Written for moms who want to spend quality time with their children, the guidebook shares distinct game ideas for each day, all of which are easy to play with your child. At the end of the book, the author, a working mother with three children, listed the beautiful features she learned from children thanks to all these games. The one I liked the most was 'children are happy with the little things without expecting the big things'.
We, like children, can choose to be satisfied with the small examples above. We can see and recognize these small successes, share them with other teams and make them bigger. Hearing these will increase the belief and motivation of the teams to succeed, and will enable them to approach the expected great success story step by step.
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*: Sprint Backlog: All of the work to be done on a sprint basis. Fed from the Product Backlog and updated every sprint.
**: Author Şermin Yaşar used the name "Şermin Çarkacı" in her books before 2017.
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